Sold a Story, Part 2 - What went wrong
If you put the evidence in front of people and then fund a new approach based on that evidence, things will change, right? Right?
Episode 3 was probably my favourite episode of Sold a Story, because the way it opens tells us a lot about the difficulties of public policy. The episode opens like this (I will paraphrase for brevity and include block quotes from the transcript otherwise):
Bill Honig was superintendent of public instruction in California’s public schools in the 1980s. In 1996, he sat in front of a panel of lawmakers to discuss the changes to reading instruction - the adoption of whole language and multi-cueing as the dominant instructional strategy - that were made in the California public school system on his watch.
Bill Honig tells the lawmakers he didn’t know there was anything wrong with that cueing idea. But since he left office, he’s been reading a lot of research. And talking to cognitive scientists. And he says — now he knows.
Honig: I had to change my mind. And I think, those of us, are just all, educators are going to have to be open enough to look at the facts. There’s some very strong research on these issues. You could say 20 years ago, yes, you could substitute context or, or meaning to decode a word and that would work. And, and they didn’t have the details of it. Now they know that’s not a good strategy to teach kids. It’s a second-rate strategy that will mean that they’re slow readers for the rest of their life.
Honig: Large numbers of youngsters are being hurt by the failure to adapt to this knowledge.
(Music)
But Bill Honig was optimistic back in 1996 that things were about to change.
Honig: I think we can turn this around very, very quickly. The field is ready. The teachers are ready. They know that there’s a problem. They know that they want the details of the skills. They want somebody to lay it out for them. They’re willing to play ball.
He was confident that if teachers could learn about the scientific research on reading, they’d be convinced just like he was. He was sure that science would change the way kids are taught to read. But he was wrong.
Let’s go through those dates again. Honig was in charge during the 1980s. He was being held to account in 1996 for the decisions that were made. He had, in the intervening period, become quite confident that the research and evidence - the science - showed that they had made the wrong decision and decoding is an indispensable part of how young children should be taught to read. The fact that we are still having this conversation, with some variation, in 2023 shows that Bill Honig was not wrong once, but twice. First, for the decisions he made in the 1980s. And again, because the optimism he displayed in 1996 was, with the benefit of hindsight, totally unwarranted.
In Part 1 of this series, I said that this is “a story of policy failures at many levels”. Let’s take a look at this idea more closely.
Politics and bureaucracy
Anyone who has ever worked in and around politics knows:
Retail politics is about keeping things simple
Effective policy is about making things complicated
Successful politicians need to balance the short-term political imperative to drift towards 1) so that you can actually do enough of 2) to be competent enough to be re-elected
Politics enters into the story of the podcast with George W. Bush’s 'Reading First' proposal made for the 2000 election.1 Apparently, conservatives - including the Bush family, due to a family connection discussed in the episode - were supporters of phonics even when it was decidedly unfashionable. So when Bush won the presidency, the administration recruited actual reading experts to be part of the policy solution to the reading problem (go to the podcast or transcript to learn more). There was a $5 billion commitment and a focus on evidence-based programs. So far, win, win, win.
But let’s be real about the challenges that would have existed at the time. A few key experts don’t equate to a broadly skilled bureaucracy able to successfully navigate a $5 billion reform across multiple levels of government, and it especially isn’t enough when the partisan challenge is so massive. The political types reading this can probably guess the challenge I mean, but here it is succinctly from the podcast:
Others knew that there was this Bush administration thing called Reading First. And they were not interested. This is Carrie Chee.
Carrie Chee: Forget it, I wasn’t going to do any of that. And, you know, I wasn’t necessarily rejecting the curriculum as much as I was rejecting Bush.
Carrie Chee was a teacher in a school district outside Seattle. She was also a liberal Democrat. So were a lot of her colleagues. And they weren’t going to be for the science of reading if the science of reading was coming from George W. Bush.
There is is. A politician I hate is implementing a reform relevant to my profession and rather than engaging with it with an open mind, I will reject it because I hate them.
Hearing this made me angry. How can someone who teaches children for a living decide on the basis of their own partisan views whether they were going to engage with something that promised to make those kids’ lives better? In one sense, the teaching profession bears that blame. But, like it or not, this attitude is exactly what would-be reformer politicians on the centre-right have to deal with. Being angry with it won’t make it go away. It is what it is.
If your biggest stakeholder is all too often outright hostile to your reforms, it makes it even more important that the implementation of those reforms is flawless. Those among the stakeholders of a neutral persuasion need to be convinced of the benefits fast.
That’s not the only problem. When there’s $5 billion on the table, every two-bit academic and education publisher will come out wanting a piece of the action, slapping the words ‘evidence-based’ on whatever it is they’re flogging (the episode shows this is exactly what happened). Ultimately, the only way you can tell the snake-oil salesmen from the real deal is by having functional institutions and competent bureaucracies.
So the Bush Administration’s focus on experts can only get you so far. All the book smarts right at the top doesn’t make for people that can do the work of implementation, working with all the states and their county education boards, universities and teacher registration boards, and the plethora of other stakeholders which by nature are resistant to top-down changes that they themselves didn’t advocate.
Now, I don’t know enough about the American public sector and Republican approaches to it but if it’s anything like what I see from my own team, I suspect it would not be conducive to the massive reform that was being attempted here. Weak bureaucracies with recalcitrant stakeholders makes for ineffective policies.
The education-industrial complex
It’s no surprise that the concerns of some ended up coming to pass: literacy programs like Reading Recovery and Fountas and Pinnell that were based on multi-cueing had some phonics mixed in, teachers and schools made minimal changes to practice and just kept doing whatever they were comfortable with. Whatever they had been told was best practice.
Some of the books Fountas and Pinnell wrote were about phonics. They weren’t saying no to phonics. But they were saying you can teach a child to read without it. And the fact that they weren’t insisting on phonics was part of the appeal of their Guided Reading approach for many teachers.
I feel for teachers like Sarah Gannon, and the thousands like her across the English-speaking world. University teaches you a very particular notion about what education is; films like Dead Poets’ Society reinforce it. It’s that stupid fake quote about education being about lighting fires not filling pails. It attracts the idealistic and those who want to ‘make a difference’. In fact, my core textbook as part of my Masters of Teaching was called Teaching: Making a Difference. It contained references to visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles. Because I had been familiar enough with education research to know that was absolute nonsense, I approached the textbook with a sceptical air and I relied on it very minimally. But what of all the people who didn’t know that?
They get taken advantage of:
Sarah Gannon taught Guided Reading too. She first learned about it when she was in college at the University of Michigan. She was assigned Fountas and Pinnell’s Guided Reading book in a class. She never asked about the research behind Guided Reading. She never thought to ask. Because Fountas and Pinnell were professors. Her professors had assigned their work. Why would she question it?
Gannon: I trusted that they’re experts. I trusted that this is the way you teach reading.
Gannon: Like, how could they be, how could they be wrong?
Who could blame her when her university course was probably designed by people who thought ‘instruction’ was a dirty word? Who thought ‘teaching’, with its connotations of one person knowing a thing the other has limited knowledge of and that knowledge transmission being the subject of a sustained interaction, merely replicated hierarchies of oppression? If you don’t believe that teachers are allowed to position themselves as experts in front of children, that all they do is guide children in discovering the adult world for themselves, then why would you bother engaging in something like evidence, which presupposes a right or at least a better way of doing things - yikes, sounds like a hierarchy and we can’t have that.
Some people in this story are misled. Others are wilfully blind. Others are a combination and for some, like the teachers themselves, it can be forgivable. Goodness knows teaching is a hard job. In some systems you are just frantically paddling towards shore, grateful for whatever is tossed your way if it acts like a lifebuoy for you. Less forgivable is those who should know better, who hold tenured positions at universities, whose job it is to train people - to take them from ignorance to knowledge.
Fountas and Pinnell didn’t think they were wrong. As far as I can tell. Like I said, I haven’t been able to talk to them. I don’t know what they were thinking back in the early 2000s. They had to have heard about the scientific research on reading. There were big government reports about that research. It was in the news. But I think they just didn’t agree with it. Because they had Marie Clay’s research. They thought Clay was right. And reading scientists were wrong.
This is the early 2000s. We are not talking about the Stone Age. There is no plausible explanation for so-called ‘experts’ in reading who train teachers to not have a basic grasp of what scientific evidence looks like: how to distinguish good quality studies from poorer-quality ones; how to critically assess whether the conclusions of a study are supported by the data within it and so on. There is even less excuse when the National Reading Panel reported in 1997. Surely you cannot attribute the findings of a Congressional panel to some sort of Republican presidency, years before Bush would enter the White House.
At some point, surely, motivated reasoning becomes the only plausible answer to the question of ‘why and how did they believe this?’ Answer: it suited them to. Somehow, they were able to get away with it, with very little criticism or pushback, for a very long time.
So then we come back to the question of accountability. Who is, ultimately, accountable for the litany of failures; failures which continue to reverberate into schools in several countries2 to this day? It's probably everybody and nobody. At least in Australia, we know that the power to enact change lies with state governments and to some extent federal government. It's time that this becomes a national priority.
I had no idea about Bush’s policies around any of this! Granted, I was in Year 3 in 2000. His legacy has been totally overshadowed by the War on Terror. I wonder what he would have been like as President without it.
The Victorian Department of Education may have scrubbed all mentions of Marie Clay from its website. Perhaps the disadvantaged primary school in the regional town where I taught doesn’t still have a ‘Reading Recovery’-branded portable classroom. But I have no doubt that it’s still there.